This sorting and pattern activity is a great fine motor and visual motor task for young learners. I love that the fine motor aspect builds pre-writing skills as well as math skills. You’ll also want to grab our color and count worksheet for more fine motor work with math and patterning as well as sorting objects.
Moldable Color, Shape, Sorting, Counting, and Patterns!
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate ads. We receive a compensation when a sale is made by clicking through from our blog. All opinions are our own.
We love playing with Wikki Stix. We’ve used them in so many fun ways. One day, Little Guy and I made some shapes and did a little sorting.
Little Guy was sure to tell me if the shape didn’t quite look right. “Mom, that square doesn’t look square-y”. We counted how many of each shape we had.
Little Guy made up a subtraction game as he put them into the box. He counted each time he took a shape away and said “…minus one iiiiiiiiissss….” He had so much fun doing this little game!
After we finished with the shapes, he said we should do a pattern. We pulled all of the wikki stix into strait lines and he came up with the pattern. This was a fun quiet time activity for both of us!
This is an updated post from years back. Create a life-size indoor (or outdoor!) spider maze that kids can climb in, on, around, and through. This is just one of our favorite spider activities for building skills. Add a fine motor portion to the activity and work on vision activities like visual motor planning and hand-eye coordination as kids play this Fall and Halloween. Happy climbing!
Hand-Eye Coordination and Visual Motor Planning Spider Maze
(This post contains affiliate links.) Little Guy asked one afternoon, if we could make a Living Room Spider Web. We made one of these last year, and he remembered. He remembers every time he sees the skein of red yarn
.
He says he has to work on his “skills” when he’s crawling over, under, and between strings. All the better to get the bad guys!
We pulled out some chairs and started spinning our web!
This time, we added a twist to our Spider Web. We strung a few Halloween spider rings
along the web. Little Guy had so much fun pulling the rings along the length of the yarn
, around chair legs, down the slopes, and up and over other pieces of yarn.
Motor Planning Maze:
Moving over, under, and around requires gross motor skills and motor planning to plan out, organize, and carry out an action. With the added twist of moving the ring along the length of the string, we added a could of extra developmental skills…
Eye-Hand Coordination Maze:
This was a life-sized puzzle for him as he crawled over and under the string to manipulate the plastic ring along the length of the yarn. What a great visual motor activity for him! He had to visually scan where the ring would go next, and manage his hands to work the ring along the yarn.
Fine Motor and Bilateral Hand Coordination Maze:
Working both of his hands together in a coordinated manner was essential for this activity, and to move that little spider ring along. He had to hold the yarn with one hand and string the ring along with the other hand. All while moving over and under strings below him and above him.
Little Guy LOVED the spider web in our living room. And asked to make another the next day. Try this one…you’re little guy or girl will have so much fun!
We love to use things from the recycle bin in play. This cereal box was on it’s way out of the kitchen one morning, but first we had a little fun!
While the kids were playing, I used scissors to poke holes all over all sides of the cereal box. I cut up a couple of straws into little pieces and put both on our train table for the kids to discover.
Baby Girl was the first to see this and knew right away what to do. She started pushing the straws into the little holes.
Tripod Grasp Activity for Kids
This was a fun activity for her and she played for the longest time. She really worked her fine motor skills to grasp the little bits of straws…using a tripod grasp and tip to tip grasp to hold the straws and push them through the holes.
Bilateral Hand Activity for Kids
She demonstrated bilateral hand coordination (using both hands together in a coordinated manner) to turn the box over and around looking for little holes.
Visual Scanning Activity for Kids
This was a great way to practice visual scanning as she searched for holes to push the straw pieces into.
Note: always use caution when playing with one of the activities posted on this blog. Adult supervision and caution should always be exercised and activities should be tailored to meet the needs and abilities of your child.
We’ve had a bag of mixed nuts with shells sitting out in our living room for days now. A couple of bowls and spoons make for a fun play activity for all times of the day!
Use this fine motor activities to teach kids hand dominance while working on bilateral coordination, visual motor skills, and more!
I gave the kids a couple of bowls and spoons with the walnuts, almonds, chestnuts…and a few other ones that I’m not sure of the names 🙂 …and they immediately started pouring from bowl to bowl.
Invitation to Transfer
Baby Girl (almost 2) and Little Guy (4) have been loving this! Little Guy’s been sorting the chestnuts into a pile and gathering them all up into a bowl. Baby Girl has been pouring and transferring nuts from bowl to bowl…and scattering the nuts allllll over the place 🙂
Invitation to Pour
This is such a great fine motor activity for little ones, and they love playing with a novel item. Pouring requires precise bilateral hand coordination or the nuts scatter all over the table…Although, they seem to enjoy that just as much!
Invitation to Scoop
Scooping the nuts with spoons allows for a great fine motor activity and fine motor coordination development, too. Baby Girl is getting some great spoon practice with this activity!
I’m thinking the walnuts, almonds, and friends will be out on the train table for a few more days for fun and exploring!
It’s that time of year when we just want to go to the apple orchard…
…or pick up a 3 pound bag of apples at the grocery store 🙂
Apple crisp, apple painting, apple pie, apple cider…We love fall and all things apples!
Our round-up today on Share It Saturday features activities, play, crafts, learning, and cooking all with an apple theme. Perfect for this time of year!
We’re ready to try some of the activities shared this week and enjoy the season of apples!
We’ve been having a ton of fun with clay recently. One sunny afternoon, Big Sister and Little Guy got creative and covered a big rock with clay. It sat out in the sun and got pretty soft.
It’s a great way to encourage development of fine motor skills and hand strength in a fun way!
This post has been sitting as a draft for weeks! We made a clay rock a while ago and before this was published, I wanted to see what our rock would do in the rain. It worked!! Check it out:
Sensory Play with Clay and Rocks
What great sensory play! Pressing that clay around was such a neat sensation. They could smear the clay around into such a pretty design!
Fine Motor Play with Clay and Rocks
Pressing the clay was a great fine motor strengthening activity. They could isolate individual fingers, press and push the clay into the other colors. The resistance of the clay worked their little hand and finger muscles.
So, after the rock sat out in the HOT sun for a while, we noticed that the clay was becoming warmer. We wondered what would happen if we baked the whole rock and clay.
Mom put the rock on a piece of aluminum foil and baked the rock on a cookie sheet at 350 for about 15 minutes. When this rock came out, the color was spread all over the rock! What a pretty rock for our yard.
I wanted to wait and see what would happen to our rock after it was out in the rain and sun for a few weeks. It is still looking very bright and pretty! The clay hasn’t seemed to come off at all in the elements.
This was such a fun experiment. Every time Little Guy sees the rock he says: “Hey Mom, Look at that rock, that was SO FUN!”
This was a child-led activity after …someone… emptied a bunch of our sensory bottles into the little play sink! I had super glued the lids shut, but a bigger cousin had a great idea to cut the bottles open. Super good problem solving, right? We had all kinds of things in this little sensory sink…pieces of straws, bits of yarn, glitter, foam snowflake stickers, crafting poms…It was very sensory!!
So, what does a mom do…don’t stress the mess, roll with it 🙂
Fine Motor Sensory Play
I added a few utensils from my kitchen to scoop, transfer, and stir…and a couple of containers from our recycle bin. Baby Girl had a blast with this while the big kids were at school.
Using the Turkey baster to squeeze is such a great hand strengthening activity! Transferring the objects with a spoon really works on her visual motor skills. Scooping up crafting poms from that sensory water is a great task for an almost 2 year-old.
Sensory Sorting
Baby Girl sorted the objects into sections of a muffin container, with a little verbal cueing from Mom. This is a fun way to incorporate sorting into sensory play…and she loved pretending to cook in her little kitchen!
It was a pretty fun way to recycle our sensory bottles!
This word scavenger hunt is a hands-on play activity to work on sight words, spelling words, or common words. Use this creative sight word activities for kindergarten and active learning. While we used this activity many years ago to practice sight words, you can definitely use the idea to practice reading words and spelling words. Kids love these sensory word ideas to practice reading words with multisensory learning and gross motor play.
We started practicing sight words. One day we took them outside for a little movement and learning.
Word Scavenger Hunt
Setting up a word scavenger hunt is easy. We used bright yellow cards to write the words to make it easier to spot the letter cards, but you could use any type of paper, or even letter rocks to spell out sight words.
Another idea is to use clothes pins in the scavenger hunt. This is a great adaptation to the activity because you can foster hand strength, too.
I wrote our sight words on the sidewalk and had the kids match them up with our cards.
They jumped on the word as I called it out and then could put the card on top. This was a good gross motor coordination warm-up for our Scavenger Hunt.
Big Sister went off and closed her eyes so she couldn’t see (with a little peeking…) and I hid the cards in different places in our yard.
When all of the cards were hidden, I had her come back to the sidewalk and I would say one of the words. She ran off and tried to find the word.
We had sight words hidden all over! The kids had so much fun with this. Even Little Guy, who hasn’t been practicing the sight words, got in to the action. He loved helping Big Sister hide the words for me to find too.
When it was my turn to find the words, Big Sister would read one of the words on the sidewalk and I had to go find it. I would ask her, “is this pan…?” So she could read the word on the card, too.
After the Sidewalk Sight Words and Scavenger Hunt, we put the cards in the water bin with some bird seed for fun sensory play.
We’ve been doing a bunch of different activities with our sight words.
Looking for more ways to practice building words and spelling using letter cards or manipulatives? Grab our Letters Fine Motor Kit.
Want printable handwriting and sensory motor activities to target the visual motor skills needed for letter writing? Grab a copy of our Letters! Fine Motor Kit. The printable PDF contains 100 pages of hands-on letter writing practice for multisensory handwriting!
A-Z Multisensory Writing Pages: Roll a ball of dough letters, ASL sign language letters, gross motor movement, small-scale letter box writing task, finger isolation letter trace, and writing practice area
Alphabet Fine Motor Clip Cards– Clip clothespins or paper clips to match letters with various fonts to strengthen the hands and focusing on eye-hand coordination, bilateral coordination, visual processing skills, and more.
Cut and place Fine Motor Mazes– Cut out the letter pieces and trace the maze with a finger to work on eye-hand coordination and finger isolation. Place a small letter on the letter spots to address in-hand manipulation and dexterity skills.
A-Z Cotton Swab Cards– Includes upper case and lower case letters. Dot the cards using a cotton swab or laminate the cards and use them over and over again.
A-Z Pattern Block Cards– These cards include a section for tracing with a finger tip for separation of the sides of the hand, eye-hand coordination, and finger isolation during letter formation. There is also a space to “finger write” the letter using the fingertip. This multisensory letter formation activity can be a great brain break during handwriting or literacy tasks. Learners can then form the letter using parquetry blocks.
Fine Motor Letter Geo-Cards– These geo board cards include A-Z in upper case forms. Users can copy the letter forms in a variety of multi-sensory strategies.
A-Z Color and Cut Letter Memory Cards– These upper case and lower case letter cards can be used to color for letter formation. Then use them in fine motor matching tasks or in sensory bins.
Color By Size Sheets– Help learners discriminate between tall letters, small letters, and tail letters. This visual perception activity invites learners to color small areas, using hand muscles for strengthening and handwriting endurance.
A-Z Building Block Cards– These LEGO block cards invite users to copy the cards to form letters using small building blocks. Users can place the blocks on the cards or copy the letter to address visual shift and visual memory. This activity set comes in upper case and lowercase letter forms.
A-Z Play Dough Letter Formation Cards– Print off these cards and laminate them to create play dough mats. Learners can form the letters using the arrows to correctly form letters with play dough while strengthening their hands and visual motor skills. Each card includes a space for practicing the letter formation, using a dry erase marker if the cards are laminated.
Graded Lines Box Writing Sheets– Users can trace and form letters in boxes to work on formation of letters, line awareness, starting points, and letter size.
Alphabet Roll and Write Sheets– Roll a dice and form the letter associated with the number of dots on the dice. This is a great way to work on letter formation skills using motivation. Which letter will reach the top first? This activity is easily integrated with a rainbow writing task to increase number or repetitions for letter practice.
Pencil Control Letter Scan– Use the letter bubble tracks to scan for letters. Users can fill in the letters of the alphabet to work on pencil control skills.
Color and Cut Puzzles– Color the pictures to work on hand strength and letter formation skills. Then cut out the puzzles and build visual perceptual skills.
Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.
This was a super easy and very fun fine motor activity we did one day. Perfect for the littlest ones who find dinner-prep time is time for Mom to hold her while sautéing chicken
…cough, Baby Girl, cough…
Pull out one color of play dough and one matching color of Legos. Baby Girl loves her mega blocks and we play with them daily. This was perfect for her because she could press the blocks into the dough and see an imprint of squares and circles. Great for language development, as well as color identification.
She liked that she could press the little circle “buttons” (and this works those little muscles of the hand and index isolation).
We’ll be pulling out the play dough and Lego blocks again, for sure!
